And yes, the stream of controlled Windows 8 leaks continues. This time around, Thurrot and Rivera have published a number of screenshots from Windows 8's brand-new tablet user interface, and surprise surprise, its built on Metro, the same design language that underpins Windows Phone 7. Windows 8 will also include its own PDF reader, Modern Reader, which also happens to be the first application packaged in Microsoft's new AppX format. Update: Long Zheng has some technical details on AppX, including this little tidbit: "The extensive list of properties signifies the comprehensive scope of this system to be the ideal deployment strategy for 'applications', in all essence of the word. In fact, the AppX format is universal enough so it appears to work for everything from native Win32 applications to framework-based applications and even *gasp* web applications. Games are also supported."

"Since using it means that one has a very full-featured, work-alike free Office Suite program with better interoperability than MS Office, and which doubles as a PDF generation and edit facility as a bonus, then it is very surprising that this number is not much higher.

It only has better interoperability idealogically, pragmatically the business world uses Office, and there are gotchas on anything but the most simple of documents. Most places use Office 2000 or 2003, if you are lucky they might have 2007 installed.

The vast majority of Workstations in a business will either be Mac or a Windows workstation .. the only common format for documents is either PDF or Microsoft Office formats. "

Actually, between 10% and 20% of machines have an OpenOffice variant installed, depending on the country. This holds just as true for business machines as it does for personal machines.

You can argue the toss all you like, but this won't change overnight.

No it won't. The OpenOffice (or variant) installed base is creeping upwards at only about 1% or so per year. Still, at least it is going up, and the MS Office installed base, likewise, is falling.

This is probably not everything that can be done using Adobe software, but it does seem to cover a lot of bases and should be perfectly adequate for most people and use cases.

Not everything means, that for the most basic uses it will be insufficient. Also these open source readers and free readers don't render everything exactly the same. "

I think you may be a little confused, the features I showed were for PDF export from LibreOffice. (LibreOffice and OpenOffice have a large team of programmers working on the project). Anyway, those are the features one may use when generating a PDF from LibreOffice.

Some of the lesser-used supported formats do not have quite the same level of support in Okular that PDF format has.

I work with a system that has 10000s of PDFs and I have had calls where Foxit and Mac PDF readers are not rendering it correctly, therefore we mandate Adobe Reader since our publication team use Adobe Pro PDF tools. So to ensure compatibility I can only recommend using Adobe PDF reader.

I can't speak for the support of single-author amateur freeware programs for Windows and Mac, but Okular has excellent support from a team of programmers.

This is probably not everything that can be done using Adobe software, but it does seem to cover a lot of bases and should be perfectly adequate for most people and use cases.

"Not everything that can be done using Adobe Software" is precisely why we are using it.

I think you may be a little confused, the features I showed were for PDF export from LibreOffice. (LibreOffice and OpenOffice have a large team of programmers working on the project). Anyway, those are the features one may use when generating a PDF from LibreOffice.

Reading/Producing/Exporting ... doesn't matter we use Adobe to produce and we use Adobe to read ... this means we can guarantee it works, we have fewer phone calls and less time wasted.

Spending a few hundred pounds on Adobe software is worth it over the year as we would have to employ someone else for tens of thousands.

Some of the lesser-used supported formats do not have quite the same level of support in Okular that PDF format has.

Great it works well enough for you.

But we already have a working solution that our users know how to use. It is called Adobe Reader and works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes installed as standard as part of our "standard" Windows XP install.

I can't speak for the support of single-author amateur freeware programs for Windows and Mac, but Okular has excellent support from a team of programmers.

Okular purportedly works on multiple platforms, including but not limited to Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, *BSD, etc. Perhaps you should look into it.

Enjoy.

Why would I care that it takes up "only" 20mb on disk? Even my SD card in my phone is 4GB. Program size on Disk is a non-issue. I hate it how somehow this is touted as a feature ... it is a pointless metric when even the average phone has gigabytes worth of storage. Maybe 15 years ago when Hardrive space was rare ... but today it is pointless.

Adobe Reader works on Windows, Mac and Linux which is pretty much everyone (even as a BSD guy I accept that support is limited for my OS). For the vast majority of people Adobe Reader will work for them. Maybe you should look into that.

For the business I work in ... We have Adobe at both ends this ensures compatibility and therefore we have less support calls from users.

But we already have a working solution that our users know how to use. It is called Adobe Reader and works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes installed as standard as part of our "standard" Windows XP install.

Adobe Reader works on Windows, Mac and Linux which is pretty much everyone (even as a BSD guy I accept that support is limited for my OS). For the vast majority of people Adobe Reader will work for them. Maybe you should look into that.

For the business I work in ... We have Adobe at both ends this ensures compatibility and therefore we have less support calls from users.

Adobe reader is very slow and bloated, it takes absolutely ages to load compared with a modern alternatives, and on Windows systems it is a huge security risk.